As wireless communication systems are deployed, there is a need to be able to capture or make measurements of wireless communication signals at various locations to identify and diagnose communication problems, which may be location-dependent, and to identify when additional communication resources need to be deployed to serve a particular area.
FIG. 1 illustrates a process 100 of measuring a signal of interest and analyzing the measurement data. In the example of FIG. 1, the signal of interest may be a radio frequency (RF) signal of a wireless communication system.
In a step 110 a user provides the settings that will be used, for example by a measurement instrument, to measure the signal of interest.
In a step 120, the user starts the measurements, for example by providing the signal of interest to the measurement instrument and instructing the measurement instrument to begin capturing, or making measurements of, the signal of interest. From this point, the signal of interest is captured (e.g., digitally sampled) and measurement data representing the received signal of interest is recorded as time elapses. Typically, the signal of interest is captured for a particular length or time period.
In a step 130, the measurement data from the signal of interest is stored to a file or array in a memory device for subsequent processing.
In step 140, the measurement data representing the received signal is transferred from a storage device or memory to a processor which processes the measurement data “off-line” or in non-real-time according to a desired algorithm whose parameters may be provided by the user in step 110. In some embodiments, processing the measurement data may include detecting a power level of the received signal as a function of time. In some embodiments, processing the measurement data may include demodulating the received signal and converting it to a set of baseband data.
In a step 150, the processed data is sorted and displayed to a user.
Long captures of wireless communication signals can produce a lot of data. For example, a one minute recording of a 20 MHz wide Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless signal may produce 7 GB of data. Traditionally one needs to analyze all of this measurement data to find where a problem exists. However, analyzing this amount of data can take a prohibitively long time.
In order to avoid having to analyze such large amount of data, a trigger may be employed to try to capture only the data of interest. However, setting up the right trigger condition(s) is hard and time consuming, especially where the user does not have the a priori information needed to configure the trigger function. In some situations, a user may view a time-domain representation of a signal on an oscilloscope, and adjust the trigger accordingly. However, the time-domain representation of modern wireless signals, such as orthogonal frequency domain modulated (OFDM) signals, is often too complex for visual interpretation and may not reveal the information that is needed or desired.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method for efficiently processing and analyzing large amounts of measurement data.